Tonight I sat down to
write a post about the despair and anger I see every day now in this country. I
wanted to find out why, where it came from, when it started. I wanted to look
at it in context of my own move here in 2005, and I wanted to look at it in
context of social policy.
After an hour I gave
up. Everything I was reading was too depressing. There didn’t seem to be any
positive stuff anywhere.
What happened to the “lucky
country” that I moved to nearly 9 years ago? What happened to the sense of
community that so awed me the first couple of years?
I spend a lot of time
on social media – way too much, truth be known, but I don’t watch TV and I don’t
read newspapers. I refuse to support anything that originates from Murdoch or
Fairfax, so I Google, I Facebook, I Twitter. It’s in these places that I find
the angst of those who feel so disenfranchised by what is happening in
Australia now, today, this year.
This is an Australia no-one
ever imagined, where environment takes a back seat to corporate greed and land
lust; where the first female prime minister can be subjected to some pretty
disgusting sexist personal attacks; where refugees are detained in inhumane
conditions because no-one knows how or wants to manage a growing world problem;
where destruction of world heritage sites becomes just another day’s work;
where people who love each other and want nothing more than the same rights as
everyone else are treated as second rate citizens; where politicians believe
they have a “mandate” to destroy everything that is just and right; where one
class of person – Kiwis - is left to slip through the cracks because no-one
would ever define them as needing assistance. Most Australians would not even
know about the injustice of being a Kiwi in this “lucky” country.
The saddest part of
all, for me, is talking to people who have no idea that their comments are
racist or sexist or homophobic, but who, for the most part, are simply
parroting the daily sludge fed to them by the mainstream media. It’s called
indoctrination. And if we thought it was
being done to our kids by a religious cult, we’d scream bloody blue
murder. But it’s being done insidiously,
every day, by something much more powerful and therefore much more dangerous.
I have joined marches
for Climate Change, to Fight for the Reef, for Marriage Equality, to Reclaim
the Night. I have danced and sung and shouted and tweeted to bring attention to
the growing problem of violence against women and children. I have blogged and railed against the health
system, signed petitions to save the orangutans and whales and dolphins, I am
anti BSL, anti pornography and anti guns. I am a proud feminist. But the problem I see everywhere is that
there is no coherence to the fight against… anything. A serious discussion with
most thinking people will reveal that they have a similar basic humanist
philosophy, and yet the organisations they belong to are different than the
ones I belong to, and often even have different means of attempting to achieve
the same result.
This is a huge
problem, because the “enemy” – corporate greed, dehumanizing of problems to
suit political agendas, haves and have nots – are the same, and they have the
resources that we, as individuals, never will.
It will only be by coherent and integrated means that we will ever stand
up against the destruction of society as we know it.
Every day I see
someone saying “It’s time”. YES, it IS
time – time to join together and take back – or even start again – a world that
is built on compassion, not money.
Idealistic? Maybe. But who can really justify the spending of trillions
of dollars annually for wars which serve no good purpose, when the entire world
can be fed for a fraction of that price tag?
We’ve tried war. We’ve tried greed. We’ve tried destruction
and capitalism and rape and violence and none of those things have worked.
We have never tried
compassion. Why not?
Let’s start here, now,
in Australia.
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